


And No Birds Sing

by Anti_kate



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Beauty and The Beast except the beast is a snake, Because Crowley is half-snake, Egregious John Keats references, Hallucinations, Historical, Horror Elements, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, M/M, Melusine (French mythology), Memory Loss, Naga, Naga Crowley (Good Omens), Not the fun sort of bondage, Or maybe the dragon taming scene from How To Train Your Dragon, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Restraint, When you realise you’re just rewriting The Shape of Water, ambiguous genitalia, brief mentions of self harm, dubcon, gagging, monster Crowley
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:02:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23136616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/pseuds/Anti_kate
Summary: There was something in the shadows. Something coiled there, the light gleaming on dark scales. Something misbegotten and monstrous.No, not a monster. Crowley.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 518
Kudos: 1121
Collections: The Snake Pit





	1. The sedge has withered from the lake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [summerofspock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerofspock/gifts).



> The delightful Summerofspock asked for monster Crowley, and I’d had the story of Melusine kicking around in my head for a while. So... here it is. I hope you like it!  
> CW: monster Crowley, some violence, and mild horror elements. I will probably update CWs and tags as the story continues, so please take note.  
> Beta’d by the fabulous NarumiKaiku, who always makes things better.

**France, 1291AD**

Aziraphale eased down off his horse and stretched his back, easing the sore muscles with a tiny miracle. He wasn’t sure where he was, exactly, except that it was a small and muddy village somewhere in Normandy. He was tired, and hungry, and sick of the sight of the back of the horse’s head. He’d been travelling for months, since he’d left the Holy Land in the spring after the disastrous siege of Acre. 

The Holy Land, he thought. Nothing Holy about what the humans had been doing there for centuries. 

He’d had too much time to think on the journey. Thoughts circling in his mind, like crows on the edge of the battlefield, waiting for the fighting to ease so they could feast on the dead and dying. 

Buck up, he told himself sternly. It didn’t help.

And now it was autumn again, and the countryside was all shades of desiccated brown and dried out yellow, the trees skeletal against skies the colour of steel. The wind was hard and cold.

He was an angel, ageless, unceasing, built to perform his duties until the end of the universe. He shouldn’t feel so very, very tired. And old. He was older than the world itself, and he felt it, an ache inside his very bones. 

The village, small and muddy though it was, had an inn at least, and he could smell something cooking, and his stomach rumbled hopefully. 

A boy came out and took his horse and he went into the warm dimness within, and a few minutes later he was seated at a wooden bench with a bowl of stew. There were a few other men in the inn, older, mostly, too old to be in the fields. 

“Back from the war then?” The inn-keeper said as he put a mug of ale down on Aziraphale’s table.

Aziraphale had had this conversation, or a variation of it, every day for the past six months, in a multitude of languages, across countries and continents. 

“Heading home?” the man added. 

Home. Well. He thought of a tent on a plain in Wessex, of a Roman villa, a mud hut by a river, and before all that, a garden. 

None of them had been home. 

He thought of Crowley, but pushed the thought away, as he always did. 

Angels didn’t have homes. 

“Something like that,” Aziraphale replied. “I say, do you know the way to the Saint Rafael Abbey? I had thought it was near here somewhere, but I have spoken with several people who did not know it.”

The inn-keeper frowned. “Can’t say I do. Near here, you said?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale took a sip of his ale. “They apparently have quite the scriptorium and I have quite a passion for the written word... anyway. I can’t quite seem to locate it. Rather odd that.” 

“Did you say the Abbey of Saint Rafael?” One of the other patrons of the inn, a white haired man bent over himself, with arthritic hands and rheumy eyes, said from near the fire. 

“He did indeed, Gaston,” the inn-keeper leaned on the table. “Gaston’s the oldest man in the village.”

The old man gave a hoarse laugh. “True. Well, that Abbey burned down ... most have been forty years ago, give or take. Don’t remember exactly. You know what it’s like when you get old, you forget things.”

Aziraphale did not know that, and had a distressingly clear recall of the events of the last five thousand and something years, but he nodded, and gestured for the inn-keeper to pour the man another cup of ale. 

“They built it too close to her island,” the old man said, leaning closer to Aziraphale, his voice dropping as if he were about to launch into a dramatic tale of some sort, 

“Who’s island?” Aziraphale asked, as it seemed to be the desired response. 

“Melusine,” the old man said, as if dropping the name of Satan himself. 

“Not that nonsense again,” one of the other men laughed. “Stupid old coot.”

“Nonsense! It’s as true as the day is long!” the old man snapped in return. “She lives in the ruined tower. She howls at night. They built the abbey too close to her and it drove them mad. Whether ‘twas the sound of her screaming, or... well. Lust.” He grinned, a gap-toothed leer. “I saw her once, when I was boy.”

“Of course you did, Gaston,” the other man said, but there was fondness in his voice. 

“I did. My brothers and I were hunting coneys. Got a bit turned around in the woods. Well, we came upon the tower just on sunset. It’s on a little island, you know, in a small lake. The main building is half ruined but the tower’s still standing. Or it was, last I saw it. And it’s all overgrown with brambles and thistles, higher than a man’s head. And there’s some thorn vine that’s climbed all over the tower, We thought we’d camp there, in the trees by the lake. But as soon as the sun fell...”

The man paused, either caught in memory or for dramatic effect. Aziraphale couldn’t help it, and leaned closer. He’d always loved stories. 

“The sound began. A terrible wailing, and hissing too. And then we saw her, on the top of the tower.”

The room seemed darker and closer now, and everyone was listening to the old man. 

“She had... a strange way of moving. Some say she’s half snake, you know, and maybe that’s what I saw. All I know is she moved odd, and she had the longest hair I ever saw on a person. And bright red it was too. Wild and tangled.” 

Something in Aziraphale twisted at that.

“And she had... well. Looked like wings to me. My brother always said it must have been a cloak, or something, flapping in the wind behind her. Anyway we saw her, moving about the top of the tower, making that terrible cry, and then she turned and I swear she saw us. I’ve never been so frightened then or since. Her eyes seemed to glow. It was like time stopped then, too, and I thought the devil himself would come claim my soul in that moment.”

There was a long silence. One of the other men made the sign of the cross. 

“What did you do?” Aziraphale asked, finally. 

“Oh we ran, fast as we could. Got ourselves all turned around, even more lost. Ran around until dawn, limped home eventually. Didn’t got a coney either.” The old man gave a dry laugh, and then sipped his ale contemplatively. “Never forget that night as long as I live.”

“And neither will the rest of us,” one of the other men said.

“I know what I saw,” the old man slapped a hand on the table in front of him. “Melusine. It was her. My Ma said she was cursed by a magician to live in the tower until her true love comes and frees her with a kiss, or the stars fall from the sky.”

“Your Ma was the biggest gossip this side of Rouen,” someone else said, and the other men laughed, the spell of the story was finally broken, and the talk in the inn moved on to other things. 

Aziraphale let it wash over him as he ate his stew–which wasn’t bad, considering–the everyday chatter of this domestic matter or that, of cows and sheep, of someone’s illness and another one’s gout. 

Some time later he left the inn with directions to the Abbey, and a saddle pack full of bread and cheese and apples, and a few bottles of wine. 

“It’s not good land out there,” the inn-keeper had said as he’d left. “Boggy and marshy. There are wolves too. And that tower... it’s an odd place all right. We’ve all heard strange noises out there.” He too had crossed himself, and Aziraphale had only smiled lightly. 

Aziraphale didn’t hold out much hope there’d be anything left of the monks’ collection, but he went anyway. It was just a ruin, the shell of a once grand stone building, but he poked around it fruitlessly for a while, the horse nosing at the grass beside a low stone wall.

Anything of value the Abbey had once held was long gone, and he sighed and went back to the horse.

It must be near dusk now, he realised, and even he shouldn’t be travelling alone after dark in unfamiliar country. 

“Now what do we do?” he asked it, but it ignored him pointedly, flicking its ears. He hadn’t had any orders from Heaven since they’d ordered him to leave Syria. 

He hadn’t heard from Crowley since the late 1100s. They’d last met in Seville, and walked through the streets together under the shadow of the minarets. The streets had smelled of orange blossom, and they’d eaten in the markets, bowls of rice cooked with chicken, olives and saffron. 

He’d agreed to a few temptations in Portugal, and Crowley had said he was headed to the Low Countries. They’d parted ways, and that had been it for over a hundred years. 

He was glad he hadn’t seen the demon during the bloody wars in Damascus and Constantinople. He’d seen Pestilence and War and Death and Famine in those places but no signs of hellish activity, at least not that he could determine. Just humankind’s own horrors.

“Back to the village then,” he said to the horse. “Maybe after that we’ll head back to England, what do you think, boy?”

He had no idea if the horse had opinions on its own gender, or where it wanted to go, and he suspected it mainly wanted somewhere warm to sleep and lots of lucerne. An admirably simple desire. 

He was just about to–reluctantly–get the saddle back on the horse when he heard it. A thin note that at first seemed to thread with the wind. Except then it was very clearly not the wind, but something else. Almost a keening sound. A wounded animal. 

The horse, normally the most placid of creatures, skittered under his hands as he reached for the reins, and then as the noise suddenly crested, reared away from him. Then it was gone, bolting off into the gloaming. 

Aziraphale stood, staring after it, too surprised to do anything for a moment. There was suddenly silence, and it was almost as strange as the wailing had been. 

“Blasted creature!” he cursed at the place where it had disappeared into the woods. Now he’d have to walk, it was far too far to teleport without a severe dressing down from upstairs. 

He’d taken off the saddle and his pack, so at least he had his few possessions, and he picked up the bag and slung it over his shoulder. 

He turned to walk after the horse, back towards the village, and paused. The wailing had started again, this time faint, almost at the edge of his hearing. It wasn’t a good sound. Made by something that was almost certainly suffering. And he was an angel, his very job was to ease suffering. (Your job, he thought of Gabriel saying, is to do what you’re told.) He wavered, then turned in the other direction, and set off deeper into the woods, following the sound.

The trees were thicker here, the undergrowth dense, and it took him some time to pick his way through. All the while the sound grew louder, until it felt like it was filling his head, a desperate screaming. He knew with certainty now that it wasn’t an animal or a human making it–nothing of the earth could make such a cry, for so long. As the noise grew, so did his dread, that what was waiting was something he desperately didn’t want to see. 

He stumbled out of a break in the trees, there was just enough light left to see the grey glimmering of water ahead of him, and looming above, the shape of a tower, a darkness against the last stain of daylight in the sky.

The unearthly sound stopped then, and Aziraphale knew he was being watched. 

He could see well enough in the semi-darkness, and could make out the curve of the lakeshore away from him. The old man had told the truth–there was a small island on the lake, almost completely occupied by the tower and the crumbling remains of a hall. Windows gaped in the exterior, and he could see the dense thorn bushes clumping around the building. 

He shivered. It was a cursed place, he felt it, a blot on the world.

The silence, after the wailing, was almost as unnerving. Expectant. The sensation of observation was like a physical weight as he lingered there, afraid. Not for himself, but for what he would find.

He gathered up his courage, and walked on the water to the other side.

As soon as he reached the shore there was a clattering from the tower above and he looked up, but it was too dark to make anything out. He could just see a door, a void, but his way was blocked by the tangle of thorn bushes. 

Very well then, he thought, and waved his hands. The bushes rustled with a harsh scratching and parted, reluctantly, it seemed, only as far as a body could pass. He frowned at them but they yielded no further. 

It was some sort of magic, he could feel it now. Somewhere in another dimension he opened several of his other eyes, and saw a sickly aura shimmering in the air. His every instinct was to turn and run, instead he moved towards the door.

The thorns seemed to leap out and grasp at his clothes, scratching him more than once. He yelped as one particularly vicious one snagged across his shoulder with a sharp burn, and as soon as he stepped through the doorway the thorns scratched their way back, once more an impenetrable thicket of bars. 

It was too dark inside to see, so he snapped his fingers once more. “Let there be light,” he said, and the ruined hall was flooded with the light of heaven.

It was still eerily silent. 

The hall’s roof was completely gone, the flagstone floor was littered with rubble. There was a pile of bones near Aziraphale’s feet and he stepped back and heard something crunch. It was the skull of some animal, a deer perhaps. He wasn’t really sure, except he was relieved it wasn’t human.

He crossed the floor and stepped through the dark doorway into the tower, the light flowing after him. Another room, this one empty of everything except a pile of what seemed to be broken furniture in the corner. Narrow stone stairs through another doorway, and he followed them up into another stone-walled room. This one was high-ceilinged, so high the light didn’t quite reach into the shadows above.

All there was in here was a bed, rumpled as if its inhabitant had just risen and walked away. 

Aziraphale stepped into the room.

There was the faintest noise from above his head, and he looked up.

There was something in the shadows. Something coiled there, the light gleaming on dark scales. Something misbegotten and monstrous.

No, not a monster. Crowley. 

* * *

He knew as the dark shape descended, but then he must have known since he’d heard the unearthly sound, or even before that, when the old man had told his story in the smoky inn. So it wasn’t so much surprise that gripped him as he looked up into the dark rafters at Crowley’s coiled form in the corner. He could see his glowing yellow eyes and mass of hair and the outline of his upper body but beyond that, something his brain refused to make sense of. 

“Crowley,” he said. His voice shook rather more than he thought necessary. “Come down from there this instant.”

The shape in the dark corner moved, and hissed, a long slow sound, a threatening sound, and Aziraphale’s veins filled with ice. 

“Crowley,” he said again. 

The shape dropped in one fluid movement, and Crowley was across the room from him, a nightmare with dark wings and the body of a long black and red snake, much larger than a snake had any right to be, coils and coils of it where his legs belonged.

Crowley hissed again, leathery coal-and-ember wings spreading out from his back. Not glossy raven-dark feathers, but something like batwings. No, not batwings either, no bat had ever been so richly scaled or so vast, eight foot from tip to tip. 

His bottom half was entirely serpentine, black and red, the scales fading across his narrow human hips and the sides of his torso, erupting again across his shoulders and neck. 

His hair was absurdly long, falling in wild tangles around him. A deeper red than Aziraphale remembered from their last meeting, more blood than rust.

And his hands. 

Dear god, his hands. No. Claws. Long dark-tipped nails like curved knives. Too long, monstrously long, and gleaming in Aziraphale’s heavenly light.

He hissed again, opening his mouth too wide and revealing a sharp row of teeth. Every one a fang, a row of apexes, too sharp and bright. 

It was–he was–all too much and Aziraphale took a step back, involuntarily. The movement drew another hiss from the creature that was and was not Crowley. 

Because, yes this was Crowley, but there was no recognition in the sickly yellow glow of his eyes, the pupils narrow slits against the light, in the threatening mantling of his wings.

Somehow, Aziraphale had forgotten Crowley was a demon. He always knew, of course, but sometimes he forgot the details, what it truly meant. Forgot that Crowley had been reborn into a place of smoking craters and pools of acid, of sulphur burning blue, of torture and pain. Of dark scuttling things in corners and vast terrible shapes obscuring the stars.

This being, this fearsome thing, was straight from Hell. 

“Crowley,” he said again, which was a mistake, because this time Crowley didn’t hiss at him but moved suddenly across the room before Aziraphale could even draw in a breath, a blur of red and black, and as he struck Aziraphale bodily with a blow that had him staggering back, the room fell into darkness as the glowing light winked out–

–and Aziraphale’s back hit the wall and he somehow snapped the light back into being and Crowley’s bared teeth were inches from his face, his breath hot and smoky in his face, claws wrapped around Aziraphale’s biceps, claw-tips pressing into him, almost but not quite puncturing the skin.

And then Crowley screamed at him, that same inhuman wail he’d heard in the woods before. It echoed through his whole body, setting off a deep reverberation in his bones, and Crowley’s claws tightened enough that spots of pain bloomed along Aziraphale’s arms. 

Before he could even think about what he was doing, Aziraphale summoned down power and felt it discharge through him, a bolt of heavenly lightning surging out of his hands. There was a white flash and Crowley’s screaming was something else now, pain and horror, and he was across the room in one sinuous movement, and halfway up the wall and back into the shadows again.

Aziraphale staggered, as much from the shock of the power as the horror of what had happened. It had been a long time, millennia, since he’d used his powers like that. 

And he’d done it against Crowley. He’d hurt Crowley, and Crowley had hurt him. That had never happened, not in 5000 years, they’d never... hurt each other, not like that. He felt sick. 

Crowley wailed again, and Aziraphale clamped his hands over his ears. He had to do something, this was absurd, something terrible had obviously happened here... 

He snapped his fingers, and Crowley fell unconscious to the floor with an appalling thud.


	2. O what can ail thee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Crowley is restrained and gagged for part of this story. (And not in a fun way.)  
> Thanks again to NarumiKaiko for beta-ing.

Crowley woke sometime in the early hours of the morning with a jerk and a muffled snarl. He thrashed on the bed, straining against the ropes and the gag Aziraphale had manifested. The muscles of his lean arms corded and strained against the bonds, his back arched and his tail whipped furiously. The bedframe creaked, but held. 

Aziraphale had tried everything he could think of to help Crowley, after he’d willed him into unconsciousness, and nothing had worked. His miracles of transformation had slid off the demon, glittered gold and vanished into smoke in the strange air of the tower. 

And so he’d lifted Crowley onto the bed, as carefully as he could; arranged his drooping wings into what he hoped was a comfortable position. 

He wasn’t sure what he felt worse about. For making Crowley sleep, or for striking him with his powers, or for the way he’d had to manhandle him onto the bed. Crowley had never liked to be touched, he knew that. Their hands had brushed enough times over the years that Aziraphale knew he would jolt away as if stung. Even drunk Crowley kept a wary distance from him. None of this casual laying a hand here or there the way humans did. In five thousand years Aziraphale could remember with perfect clarity the scant handful of times when their shoulders had bumped together, when they’d sat side by side in some smoky tavern and been forced elbow-to-hip. The accidental press of a knee. 

Now Aziraphale had put his hands all over him as he’d lifted him onto the bed. He would have hated it. 

And of course he’d noticed, despite himself, what Crowley had felt like. How thin the demon was. He had always been lean and spare, but his bones seemed so close to his skin. There was no padding, no softness, just edges and angles. His wrists were thinner than Aziraphale expected, slender enough that he could wrap his hand around them easily, fingers overlapping. He could count each rib. His collarbones were almost sharp. His abdomen was a hollow. There were valleys beside each of his hips, and his scales began there in the shadows of those bones. 

That was fascinating, the juncture of human skin and snake. Aziraphale had resisted the urge to slide his hand along Crowley’s flank and see what it felt like, see what the difference was between skin and scale was like beneath his fingertips. 

He had caught himself staring down at Crowley, hand moving of its own accord towards his skin. He wanted to catalogue his bones and scales and lines, the exact number of his ribs, the hollow at the base of his neck, the angle of his jaw, the faint movement of his eyelashes. 

_Stop it,_ he’d chided himself, and resumed his task, winding a rope carefully around each narrow wrist, another around his tail just past the juncture of human hips and snake body. Lastly, he’d wrapped the cloth gag around Crowley’s mouth, carefully holding his hair aside so it didn’t catch in the knot. 

“I’m ever so sorry about this, dear boy,” he’d said as he tested the bonds. Crowley’s eyelids had fluttered, but he hadn’t moved. And then Aziraphale had stepped away, out the reach of Crowley’s vicious tail, and released him from his miraculous slumber. 

Watched and did nothing, as he struggled and writhed. 

“If you’d just calm down,” he finally said, when Crowley’s movements seemed to have slowed, but that just caused the demon to flail again, indignant hissing coming from behind the gag. 

It seemed like an interminable amount of time passed while Crowley struggled against the bonds and Aziraphale stood and worried at the fabric of his surcoat. 

Finally, after one last wild convulsive thrash, Crowley seemed to give up. He lay, chest heaving, before he turned his head to look straight at Aziraphale, his baleful eyes simmering in the shadowy room. 

Aziraphale took a step closer, and the demon flinched back, so he stopped. 

“You really don’t know me, do you?” he said softly. “Oh Crowley. This is quite a wretched situation you’ve gotten yourself into.”

Crowley didn’t react, barely moved now except for the rise and fall of his narrow chest with each wholly unnecessary breath.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Aziraphale said. “Again. I won’t hurt you again, that is. I’m dreadfully sorry about that. The smiting. Before. I was surprised. It rather hurt, when you,” he made claws with his fingers; Crowley’s eyes narrowed slightly, “and well. It was just instinct, I suppose. But still, I’m sure it hurt rather badly. Which was not my intention at all.”

There was nothing in the room but the bed so Aziraphale miracled up a table and a chair—he’d worry about all this in his report later—and sat down heavily.

Crowley stared. 

“I do wish you’d consider telling me what happened,” Aziraphale said, more to hear something besides the sound of his own breathing than out of any hope of getting a reply. “And then we could make a plan, figure out how to fix this. Because right now, my dear, I’ve absolutely no idea.”

He looked around the room, seeing it both with his human eyes and his thousand-eyed angelic vision. The dark sheen of the magic. A series of small windows, arrayed around the curved wall of the tower, thorn branches pressing inside. The thick grey stone. Ruined tatters of fabric on the walls, which may have been curtains or tapestries once, but looked as though they’d been shredded by an animal. 

“It seems to be human magic, which means we should be able to reverse it fairly easily,” he continued, speaking mainly for the sound of his own voice. “Of course these things are often curses and come with ridiculous riddles and clauses and so on. Perhaps that’s why you can’t speak?” 

_And why you don’t know me._

He tapped his fingers on the table. Outside, he could see the sky was beginning to lighten. 

“I don’t suppose you turn back to human when the sun comes up, do you? Well, no, you’re never human. Silly me. Back to normal. Back to yourself.”

He let his eyes flick briefly to Crowley’s unreadable face, and then down the length of him, which was now considerable. Was he 20 feet long now? Dangerously red scales from his belly down, and black across his back. In nature, Aziraphale knew, that brilliant vermilion was a sign. A warning. _Don’t touch, for I am a deadly thing,_ that colour said. _I bite, and my poison will kill you between one heartbeat and the next, a pulse of muscle that will never come._

Was Crowley truly venomous like this? 

He shook himself, annoyed. Woolgathering. Which wasn’t helping either of them.

He stood up, too quickly, and Crowley’s tail lashed.

 _He’s afraid of me,_ he realised, and slowly sank back down into the chair. The movement stopped. Crowley’s eyes were wide and fully golden, without a hint of sclera. He was wild, and he must be terrified.

A few thousand years earlier humans had first approached the wild horses of the steppes and gentled them with food, with soothing words and soft touches. They’d transformed skittish beasts with kindness. It had seemed impossible to Aziraphale at the time, that the humans could change their natures to such an extent.

Well. The demon wasn’t a beast. He was Crowley. He wasn’t a horse to be broken. He had to be in there somewhere, and Aziraphale could be kind, and gentle, and patient, while he tried to think of something else to do.

Still, the yellow-eyed creature on the bed gave no hint of being anything other than wild.

Aziraphale tried again. He stood, moved closer, slowly, carefully. Crowley’s eyes didn’t leave his face as he inched towards the bed.

Another step closer. “I’d really like to take that gag off you. But that screaming is rather hard to take in these close quarters. Do you think... do you think you could try not to do that?”

Still nothing.

He lowered the gag, and then quickly withdrew his hand away from those jagged teeth.

Crowley didn’t move. He didn’t make a noise, or snap. He lay there, extraordinarily still, and watched as Aziraphale backed himself to the table. 

He had no idea what to do next. 

After some time—it may have been a few minutes or near an hour, he pulled the bread, cheese, and apples from his pack. He bought out a small knife, sliced some of cheese and apples and ate them, barely tasting anything. 

As he did, he saw Crowley shift on the bed, lifting his head slightly.

Perhaps he was hungry? Neither of them needed food, and Crowley had never been much of an eater, but there was something there now that wasn’t just the blankness of a trapped animal.

“How rude of me,” Aziraphale said, as lightly as he could. “Would you care for something to eat?” 

Crowley narrowed his eyes, which Aziraphale took as possible agreement. So he advanced back towards the demon, slowly and carefully again. 

“I’ll untie you if you promise not to attack me again,” he said. “Do you understand?”

There was a moment, and then Crowley tilted his head, a tiny amount. Aziraphale nodded, resolute, and then set to work on his wrist.

The instant that hand was free, the demon yanked away and scrabbled furiously at the other binding, and Aziraphale snapped his fingers and it fell away, along with the other rope. (He was going to have to answer for all these miracles, he knew.)

Crowley was off the bed in an instant, and back up against the wall again. As far away as he could get. 

Aziraphale slowly, deliberately, turned his back and returned to the small table, finished slicing the apple.

If Crowley attacked him now... 

But he didn’t. 

Aziraphale turned, crossed the room, holding the plate in front of himself, an offering. He stopped, midway between them. 

Crowley moved after what seemed an eternity, and slithered—there was no other word for it—a few feet back into the room. He reached out with one long arm and took a slice of apple with his clawed fingers before retreating.

“It’s nice and crisp,” Aziraphale said, encouragingly. He took one of the slices and bit into it, putting on a show of enjoying it. “Yum,” he added, hopefully.

Crowley shot him an almost familiar look, which may have been contempt. But he lifted his own slice of apple, still watching Aziraphale, and took the tiniest, most delicate bite with his razor edge teeth. 

It was only then that Aziraphale thought an apple might not have been the best choice, but it was too late for that.

Surprise and something else flickered over Crowley’s face. He put the rest of the apple in his mouth and swallowed it whole.

“You really should chew things, you know,” Aziraphale said, which earned him another glare. 

Crowley darted forward again, grabbed the plate, and swallowed the rest of the apple slices in a matter of seconds.

This was, Aziraphale thought, progress of sorts. So he drew out the wineskin and poured two small cups. “You like wine, you’ll like this,” he said, encouragingly, holding it out again. But this time he stayed where he was, seated at the table so Crowley would be forced to come to him.

Crowley looked at the cup, and then at Aziraphale, and then up at the narrow windows, where the sky was the colour of an old bruise. 

He slowly slid forward to the table, and took the cup. 

“I’m sure it’s nowhere as good as that lovely red we had in Georgia that one time,” Aziraphale said. “Do you remember? Oh when was that... it must have been 600 years ago. They had that lovely harvest festival, and we sat in the field listening to the music.”

Crowley sniffed the wine, and then, poked out a forked tongue and lapped at it like a cat.

“Oh no, dear boy, not like that!” Aziraphale said, too sharply. The cup clattered out of Crowley’s hand and smashed on the floor, and the demon ascended into the rafters again.

* * *

The sun rose and weak sunlight filtered into the room. Aziraphale made himself pull out the small book of mathematical proofs he’d been translating from Arabic into Greek.

Above him, the creature that was and was not Crowley shifted occasionally, wings moving with the faintest noises. Sheafs of dry paper paper rubbing together, autumn leaves rustling in a faint wind.

Aziraphale tried not to look very often and succeeded mostly, but sometimes he cast his eyes upwards and would see Crowley gleaming there. The shine of an eye, or the reflection of dull grey light on glossy black scales. 

In the daylight the ruined room in the tower was, if possible, even more dismal, a chilly grey stone room with little to commend it. It was not a welcoming place. The rope-like branches in the windows with their inch-long thorns only added to the sense that this was a prison of some sort, just as the brambles below had. 

Aziraphale could sit and do the most boring of jobs for lengths of time that would have driven a human mad with boredom, but after a few hours of translating the text and copying it, perfectly, into the new manuscript—all the while ignoring Crowley—even he was feeling the strain. He lifted his head and tilted it from side to side, rolling his shoulders back.

Which gave him an idea. 

He very slowly, carefully stood. The first time he’d seen a human tame a horse she’d moved so very slowly, and casually, acting as though the horse wasn’t there. So did he. He crossed to the window as if he was strolling across a market, and looked out at the lake, and the brown-hued autumnal woods beyond. He stood for a while. 

It was so quiet. Nothing stirred in the woods beyond the tower. There were no birds, no sparrows in the brown and grey bushes, no waterfowl paddling on the edges of the lake, no hawks in the high trees. Apart from the wind and the occasional sound from above, it was a far too silent place. It made his skin itch. In fact he hadn’t heard any birdsong since... he couldn’t remember when. Crowley didn’t belong here.

He sighed, and stretched his wings out. 

It felt good to have them out. Having them hidden in the aether was like having something just ever-so-slightly too tightly bound around a limb, never entirely obvious that it was uncomfortable until it was over.

He stood, holding as still as he could bear, and waited.

After a time he heard a noise, the faint rasp of scales on stone, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that Crowley had descended from the rafters, and was poised on the other side of the grim stone room, watching him. 

He deliberately extended his wings out a little further.

“I’ve not stretched out like this for some time,” he said quietly. 

Aziraphale felt rather than heard him move closer. It made his skin crawl, the sense of something clawed and toothed approaching from behind. He was human enough for his body to tense, for fear to coil in his stomach, heavy and thick. Human enough for his heart to speed, for his eyes to dilate, for his breath to catch in his throat. 

Something touched his wing-tip, very lightly. He shivered.

He turned his head slightly, enough to watch Crowley reaching out with his hand, one claw-tip stroking down one of his long primary feathers.

He put his hands on the windowsill to steady himself, to stop himself from turning around too fast and startling Crowley away. This was about trust, wasn’t it? To show vulnerability? _You could use those claws on me, but I trust you not to._

“They must be in a frightful state,” Aziraphale said, soft and calm. “I’ve been travelling you see, from The Holy Land. Haven’t really had time to get things in order.”

Crowley’s hand continued moving. 

“Rather a dreadful mess,” Aziraphale continued. “I’m glad you weren’t there. So much senseless, wasteful death. But they do rather love their wars, don’t they?”

He remembered the bodies in the narrow streets of Jerusalem. The smell of rotting flesh. The buzzing of the flies. Sightless eyes staring up at the blank heat of the sky. The sound of men groaning as their lives ebbed away too slowly. 

He was returned to the present moment when Crowley’s talons brushed against the top of his wing, where the coverts were short and soft. It was almost unbearable, the very faintest of touches from those clawed fingers. It made him dizzy. It was like baring his throat to Crowley’s teeth, allowing him to touch his wing like this.

“Anyway. It was quite awful, and you’ve always been a rather tender-hearted thing, haven’t you?” he said, trying not to think about the claws gently moving through his feathers. “For a demon, of course.” 

The grasp on his wing tightened, not hard enough to hurt, but enough that Aziraphale felt the sharp points against his skin. Then Crowley was gone up the stairs with a flickering, uneasy motion, leaving Aziraphale standing alone in silence.


	3. With horrid warning gaped wide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to apologise for not updating this fic as often as I’d hoped, but given the state of the world right now I hope you can forgive me.  
> Many thanks to NarumiKaiko for beta-ing and hand-holding.  
> There are no CWs for this chapter beyond the general, ah, misery of the situation.  
> The poetry Aziraphale quotes is from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.  
> And finally, please please please check out [the amazing art that Claire created for this fic.](https://sungmee.tumblr.com/post/613950111554338816/so-antikate-has-this-fic-called-and-no-birds) My heart just about exploded at how beautiful and atmospheric these pictures are.

Crowley started screaming when the sun went down. 

That night, his second night in the tower, Aziraphale had left the demon alone, and returned to his book of mathematics, to the precision and clarity of numbers and proofs. The cleanliness of figures on a page, unsullied by the grime of the world. Writing things down seemed to simplify the messiness of reality. He sat and worked and tried to ignore Crowley’s screaming for as long as possible, working on the translation by miracle-light until he couldn’t deal with it anymore. 

He put the book away and looked around the dim room, coming back to where he was and why and how. Not that he knew the how, beyond that it was human magic and that Crowley was enchanted. No, not enchanted, this was a _curse._

Most human magicians were charlatans, of course, although Aziraphale still found them fascinating. Their love for illusion and trickery was almost joyful. He’d found it delightful since Egyptian times, when he’d first seen a man in the street dazzle an audience with three cups and a disappearing ball. 

But every few centuries humanity produced a magician or sorcerer with real power—power enough to trap a being such as Crowley. Mostly they went mad with it, or overreached and were destroyed by their own magic. But sometimes they grew strong enough to bend and warp the world, tapping into powers they should never have been able to reach. 

Heaven’s law dictated that they should be neutralized. Aziraphale had never done it himself, but had helped once or twice, used his powers to hold some magic-mad mortal as a Seraphim finished the job with a sword. Distasteful business, really. He couldn’t imagine what purpose sorcerers served in the great plan, but then he thought the same of mosquitos and maggots too, of the humans’ love for sharp blades and spears and flaming arrows, of children starving in the streets, of Pestilence stalking through the cold predawn air, breath turning the leaves black and setting all the voices to coughing.

Did She make all these things? Did She create suffering and sadness and pain? Or did She just allow it?

Those were dangerous thoughts. He did what he always did with dangerous thoughts and ignored them. Sent them elsewhere. Shuffled his thoughts around, cups on a table, until the ball was as good as gone, stashed deep in some sleeve or pocket. It didn’t matter where. The trick was to make it convincing. 

Crowley’s screaming vibrated through his bones, resonated deep within. After a time, it made it hard to think of anything else at all. Anything beyond running, beyond fleeing this awful place. Stumbling through the woods until he found himself back at that nice village, with those nice people, drinking ale in a warm tavern. 

He could do that. He could cross back through the thorns and over the lake and the too-quiet woods, and leave Crowley here. Abandon the wailing, wild creature in this cold place. 

Aziraphale carefully poured himself a cup of wine. Drank it in one swallow. 

There was another option, wasn’t there? If he. If he... discorporated Crowley. He’d be sent back to hell, yes, but was there also a chance that would free him of the curse?

Discorporated was a nice way of saying killed. Murdered, if Aziraphale loosed a bolt of heavenly lighting into him, or broke his neck, or dashed his head in with a rock.

There were many ways to send demons back to hell, not that he’d ever had the need, and all of them were violent and awful. Not that he’d ever wanted to, not from the first moment he’d seen Crawly in the garden. All snake then. But still beautiful.

His hands shook until he pressed them together in his lap.

He would not. He could not. 

Beyond the horror of even the idea of hurting Crowley, the demon had told him enough about hell to make the prospect doubly foul. To send him back there like this especially. What if hell decided whatever had happened to him was something punishable? 

What if he didn’t come back at all?

Crowley had, over the years, made slanted comments about Hell’s disciplinary techniques. Turned up once or twice with raw red marks on his neck or his arms, bruises that took too long to fade. A distant look in his eyes. He’d always smiled at Aziraphale’s half-asked questions, laughed them off. 

“Just a little accident,” he’d say, or, “Got ambushed by some thugs on the road.” As if he couldn’t have snapped his fingers and walked out of any situation, healed himself in an instant if marks left on his skin weren’t clearly a reminder that he belonged to hell.

Aziraphale stood, his mouth working, the wine rising again in his throat. He couldn’t send Crowley back.

The night stretched on and on, and Crowley would sometimes stop screaming for long enough to Aziraphale to take a breath, but the sound would rise again: anguished, broken. After a few hours Aziraphale felt scoured out, harrowed, until he was sure if he spent any longer in the circular room staring at the walls he’d go mad.

He put his hands over his ears and let his elbows rest on the desk, and tried to think of something else. He tried to remember Crowley as he had been. In the garden, first of all. And then glimpses of him as the humans spread out across the world. In the early days he’d had to work hard to avoid him, but once there were thousands of humans it had become easier. 

They saw each other less then, but at some point, though, Crowley had started seeking him out. 

No. That wasn’t fair. He’d done it too. He should admit to himself that after Golgotha he’d watched for Crowley’s rust and shadows among the crowds. Felt the prickle of power against his skin and followed the scent of him in the narrow streets of Minos and Babylon and Thebes and Londinium.

There wasn’t anyone else who understood. No-one else who’d known the garden, and the innocent delight of the new humans. No-one else who’d stood and watched the floodwaters rise over the dusty plains, no-one else who’d grieved the children drowned beneath the waves (they were all children, even the oldest of them). No-one else who’d known Yeshua Bin Yusuf’s laugh, or grieved him when he laughed no more. No-one else who knew any of it, knew that Aziraphale had vomited after the destruction of Sodom, knew that he’d wept horrifying snot-nosed gulping tears when Pompeii was buried by the ashes, knew that he’d wandered the ruins of Alexandria with fragments of scrolls and books tucked into his robes, ashes that turned his hair dull grey. 

Crowley was the only other being in creation who knew any of it.

It was utterly wrong to feel such kinship for a demon, and Aziraphale could usually deny it to himself convincingly enough. But not now, not when Crowley was a ruined tangle of hair and scales and misery.

His thoughts were too much for him, finally, so he stood and went up the stairs again, following the screaming, letting his hand on the curved wall guide him upwards. 

Sometime during the night the clouds had parted and there was enough moonlight for him to make out the crenellations around the tower, and Crowley, the shape of his wings black arcs in the silvery glow. His head was thrown back, the noise from his throat inhuman and awful. This close it was relentless, utterly consuming, and Aziraphale clamped his hands over his ears, pointlessly. 

Crowley’s head snapped around as Aziraphale stepped onto the tower, and the screaming abruptly stopped. Aziraphale almost sagged with relief. 

“My dear boy,” he said, “that is such a dreadful noise. And it’s rather cold up here. Why don’t you come back downstairs now?”

Crowley’s wings opened and he moved sinuously on his long tail, a strange weaving motion. For a moment Aziraphale thought he was going to attack him again, that whatever detente they’d reached before had been shattered. But he didn’t, just hissed. 

He turned away, but at least he was silent. 

The stars were incredibly bright now that the skies were clear, and Aziraphale tilted his head back and studied them. 

Human constellations were utter nonsense, he knew. They’d changed often enough in the past five thousand years. And of the stars in any single constellation, some were relatively close to earth, celestially speaking, and some unspeakably far, beyond the comprehension of humanity’s small mortal minds. Or at least that’s what Crowley had told him, one night on a dark mountainside sometime between the garden and the flood. 

“Oh look, that’s Pegasus,” he said, outlining the shape of the winged horse across the sky with his hand. “And that’s Aquarius. The water bearer. Do you see? You always liked the stars. You had a hand in making them, before, didn’t you?”

Crowley’s head moved in that strange way he had, a tilt of his jaw this way and that, but he was still silent. 

“Perhaps, if you don’t want to go inside, I might stay here with you and we can watch them together? Would that be acceptable?”

Crowley’s eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Aziraphale took the lack of response as a yes. He leaned up against the low stone wall that ringed the tower, and tried to get comfortable. 

There was blessed, perfect silence until the sun rose. 

* * *

How had those horse tamers known it would work? How was the first wolf taken from the wild and made into a creature that would curl up beside a human infant, as trustworthy as a parent? What was the trick of it?

How was it possible for Azirapahle to sit in this tower room and wait for something to happen? How long would it take?

He wanted to grab Crowley by the shoulders and shake him and shake him and tell him to wake up, to stop pretending. He wanted Crowley to laugh at him. To say this was all some hilarious joke, and wasn’t it funny, _oh Aziraphale I made quite the fool of you didn’t I? And How about some of that wine after all?_

* * *

He tried again, during the second day. Threw miracles around like chaff in a threshed field, and nothing happened.

He ate the last of his bread and cheese. He walked endless circuits around the room. He looked at his book of mathematics and his Latin copy, and felt too sick and tired and sour to pick it up again until he forced himself to it. 

_Idle hands are the devil’s tools._

Crowley moved at last sometime in the late afternoon and slithered down to the floor.

This time he came right up to Aziraphale’s shoulder and peered at the book, so close Aziraphale could have reached back and grasped his arm. But he didn’t. 

“See here,” Aziraphale said, tapping the text lightly with one finger, “they call this algebra. It’s very clever. I mean obviously it’s still rather basic compared to what you and I can do, but imagine only a few hundred years ago they could barely calculate anything. Even knowing the area of a field was beyond them. And now they’ve mastered polynomials! And cubic equations! They’re such clever creatures at times.”

Crowley was very close now, and Aziraphale didn’t even wince when he reached out and put a claw on the book, flipped a page over delicately. 

“I suppose you can’t be expected to appreciate the finer side of mathematical developments under the circumstances.” Aziraphale stilled his hands in his own lap. “I wish I had something more interesting I could read to you. There was an absolutely lovely little book of poetry I came across in Persia that you might have liked. Alas, I lost it in the fighting in Jaffa...” his hands shook, despite himself. “I can remember how some of it went. There was one line about having wine and bread and ... how did it go... _and thou beside me singing in the wilderness — Oh, wilderness were Paradise enough!”_

Crowley turned another page. 

“Not that you’re singing, and this definitely isn’t paradise,” Aziraphale continued. “I do wonder how much you understand of this. Of me. What I’m saying. Do you even know your own name?”

Crowley slithered around the table and picked up the quill, and ink smudged across his hand. He regarded it curiously, spreading ink further over his fingers.

“That’s ink,” Aziraphale said, as if talking to a small child. Perhaps he could teach him? 

It was no worse an idea than any he’d had since coming to this wretched place. 

“Ink,” he repeated, touching a finger to the small jar, and then to other things before him as he named them. “Book. Parchment. Quill. Desk. Chair.”

Crowley lifted his head and looked at Aziraphale as to say, what are you going on about? 

That was a good question, but he couldn’t stop. 

“Aziraphale,” he said, touching his own chest. And then, slowly, he extended a hand towards the demon. “Crowley.”

Crowley looked down at the hand. 

“That’s your name,” Aziraphale said. “Crowley. Do you remember it? Do you remember anything?”

Crowley tilted his head, as though listening to something Aziraphale couldn’t hear. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, very slowly, and with as much daring as he could remember having in his life, put the hand he had outstretched in the middle of the demon’s chest. Felt Crowley’s heartbeat, a juddering motion beneath bones and skin. Felt the warmth of him. “You are Crowley.”

Crowley didn’t move for a moment, then with a flick of his tail he was off again, back up into the rafters. Aziraphale let him go. 

* * *

The next night Aziraphale followed Crowley to the roof as soon as the sun set, and they stood again in the cold wind. The moon was waning now and the stars growing brighter.

Aziraphale spoke every so often, mostly just to remind Crowley he was there. Stupid stories, ridiculous observations. A puppet show he’d seen in Jerusalem. The way the Mediterranean Sea had looked in the evening light. A little viper he’d stepped around on a dusty road near Cyprus. Recounted the various foods he’d eaten. Creamy hummus atop flatbread still warm and steaming from the oven. Grape leaves stuffed with rice and tender lamb and currants, rich with allspice and cinnamon. Honey drizzled over thin sheets of pastry, flecked with pistachios and walnuts. 

The demon responded with nothing like comprehension. It was maddening. 

* * *

The third day dawned sunny and bright outside the windows of the tower, and Crowley had apparently decided to sleep now in the bed, curled up on himself, hair tangled over his shoulders, face buried in his own arms, tail draped around itself. 

Aziraphale felt vaguely ashamed of himself, sitting there watching the demon’s unmoving form, so he walked down the stairs into the ruined hall, and scuffed around pointlessly for a while. The thorn bushes crowded up over the windows and the door, but the ruined roof let the light in. There was nothing there apart from animalbones and rubble, but at least it was a change from the room above or the top of the tower. 

Aziraphale was out of food now. He didn’t need to eat, of course. But he felt hunger, and at least it was something to focus on.

And there wasn’t much wine left, either. Nor ink. Perhaps he should leave Crowley and gather supplies. Perhaps there was some text in a library somewhere that might have a clue. Perhaps he could return when he’d found that answer. There might even be a human sorcerer who might know how to help him. 

He was about the return to the tower when he saw the claw marks on the walls. Gouged deep into the stone. He walked over to the nearest wall, and traced the length and depth of one of the marks with the tip of a finger. He looked around the room and saw the marks on all the walls, and he just... hadn’t noticed them when he’d entered the hall on that first dark night. 

Crowley must have made them.

He didn’t want the image that formed in his mind, of Crowley screaming and throwing himself against the walls and clawing at the stone hard enough to make these marks. He imagined claws ripping from his fingers, hands bloodied and raw. 

His stomach churned, his mouth flooded with saliva, and he thought he might be about to vomit. There was no way he could leave this place until something changed, until Crowley changed. Until Crowley was himself again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m on Tumblr at [Antikate,](https://antikate.tumblr.com/) come yell at me about poetry any time.


	4. Full beautiful, a faery’s child

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello! This fic is very much still continuing, and thank you to anyone who is still reading. I’m hoping that updates will happen more quickly now.  
> Thank you again to NarumiKaiku for the peerless beta-ing. You are a gem.  
> CW: The sexual encounter in this chapter is, I hope, clearly consensual. However, Crowley is still not himself, and if this bothers you, I’d suggest skipping from the “Aziraphale still didn’t take his hand away.”

As it grew dark again Aziraphale called up wood and kindling, and he lit a small fire in the hearth. An accounting of just how many miracles he’d used in the past few days would arrive from heaven eventually, a golden letter that would glimmer into existence in the bottom of his saddlebag bearing a tally of each frivolous gesture.

As if their miraculous power constituted a finite resource, as if there was some sort of limit to it, a well that could be drained. Perhaps there was, though, perhaps there really was some sort of end to heaven’s power, and with each snap of his fingers he took another cup from the well and dashed it onto the endlessly thirsty sands of eternity. 

He would be more careful, once Crowley was himself again. And if heaven demanded an explanation of what happened here, he would provide it. _I will say I came across a ... good man... stricken by a sickness,_ he thought, as he fed another log into the fire. _I used my miracles to ease his suffering. That’s all._

He knew by now heaven wouldn’t check the report. Not once, in 5000 years, had they properly checked. They sent notes, yes, and sometimes demanded he curtail his miracles, and very occasionally they threatened him with some heavenly restriction of his powers. Gabriel would appear, frowning and stern to deliver a monotonous lecture, Sandalphon simpering by his side. 

But they’d never questioned what he said. Not even in the last two hundred years, when he’d started trading temptations and blessings with Crowley. 

He remembered sitting in a dim tavern and saying, finally—after so many years of doubt and fear and helpless arguments in his own mind with the smirking shadow-Crowley of his imagination—that he’d do it. That Crowley was right, that no-one from Heaven or Hell would know, that it just made sense for them to work together. 

What he hadn’t said was that he’d justified it to himself in another way, told himself it made sense to keep his enemy close, to watch his every move, to undo his dark works from within the circle of his arms. 

_(Not that close.)_

“But I won’t hurt anyone,” he’d told Crowley, firmly, and was rewarded with one of Crowley’s wide, pleased smiles. A real one, not a teeth-baring grimace pretending to be a smile.

“‘Course not,” Crowley had said, and his voice had been gentle and low and delighted too. That voice curled around Aziraphale’s spine, made his face heat, sent a prickle over the back of his neck. “You’re too good to hurt anyone. Anyway, it’s all about choices, isn’t it? It’s not about forcing anyone to do anything, or hurting them, it’s about... offering them options. Showing them the possibilities. You’re very clever, you’ll figure it out.”

Crowley’s warm approval made him feel, for a time, that he _was_ good, and he was clever.

Then came the terrible wars, and now this, and he suspected he was neither of those things, because if he was good or clever he’d know how to set the world aright. He’d know how to help Crowley.

But all he knew was how to use tiny miracles to ease a cough here, or sneak a heel of bread into a scrawny hand there. To walk across a bloody, muddy field in the wake of a battle he hadn’t been able to stop, and to help the suffering men sink into death a few moments earlier. And he hadn’t been able to help Crowley at all. 

The bed creaked, faintly. 

Crowley’s half-open eyes reflected the firelight, dark burnished amber, like the stones that washed up on the beaches of the Baltic Sea. 

Aziraphale had collected some once. He’d been living in a priory there, and he’d tucked the ends of his robes into his belt and walked barefoot along the grey sandy beach until he’d found a handful of the stones. A gemcutter in a nearby village had worked the stones for hours against another rough stone until they became cabochons.

Aziraphale had studied her handiwork, stroked over the smooth texture of the amber. Then he paid her handsomely, and left the stones in her rough little workshop. Not the sort of thing an angel should carry, jewels in the colour of his enemy’s eyes.

Aziraphale wondered how long Crowley had been watching him. He pulled his chair closer to the hearth and sat, warming his hands, conscious of the force of Crowley’s regard. “Seemed like a good night for a cosy little fire.”

The bed creaked again as Crowley pushed himself up on his arms, sphinx-like, still watching Aziraphale or the fire or perhaps, both. He flowed across to the fireside with that odd weaving motion, so much like his normal walk but also so altered.

“You must have been dreadfully cold here in the winters,” Aziraphale said, watching Crowley’s long form from the corner of his eye. “Nothing but bare stone everywhere. And you without a stitch to wear. And you’ve always rather liked your clothes. Remember that get-up you wore in Rome? An actual laurel wreath! Just to walk around the streets. You were quite the sight. No wonder everyone thought you were a barbarian.”

Crowley’s long tail curled around and around beneath him, his wings folded against his back as he leaned over the fire. 

“I never had the heart to tell you how ridiculous you were, then. Of course, you figured it out, it only took a few weeks before you looked like one of the locals. You always do figure it out, don’t you? And you almost always look very stylish, you know—”

Almost dreamily, Crowley reached out and put a hand into the hearth, and picked up a glowing coal, fire wreathing up his hand and wrist. Aziraphale’s heart stuttered at the sight of it, the fire licking about his forearm without burning. Human flesh wasn’t made for that, it should char and sear and melt. But Crowley wasn’t human, and the fire didn’t burn him—instead the tongue of flame just danced over his clawed hand.

Crowley brought the coal closer to his face, and the firelight flickered over his jawline and his crooked nose. 

“If you eat that, I’ll...” Aziraphale paused. What could he do, after all? “I’ll be very disappointed. It’s not food.”

Crowley dropped the coal back in the fire, whether through understanding or because he never intended to eat it, Aziraphale wasn’t sure. 

“As I was saying,” he continued, doggedly, “if you could see yourself, you’d be horrified. You’re practically naked, apart from...” he gestured in the general direction of Crowley’s sinuous and scaled lower half. “And your hair is in an utter _state.”_

He was close enough that he could reach out and touch a strand of Crowley’s hair, and he did. Just pushed the length of it away from where it was tangled around the clawed tip of his wing. Crowley made a tiny motion that was almost but not quite a flinch, tilting his head to look at Aziraphale with that direct, knowing gaze.

Aziraphale stilled his hand but didn’t remove it. Those wild horses seemed to like being stroked, and of course dogs and cats enjoyed human contact too. He’d seen humans with affectionate monkeys, and been in the Egyptian court when Ramses the second had reared a lion cub by hand, and it had butted up against his thigh seeking the touch of a hand. 

And then he chided himself again for thinking of Crowley as an animal. It was ridiculous, he was being ridiculous. Even like this Crowley was clearly sentient and curious, aware. 

And _his_ Crowley wouldn’t welcome being pawed at like a skittish beast—he remembered that day in the garden, when he’d stretched a wing over him. Crowley had stepped closer, until his feathers had brushed Crowley’s shoulder, and the demon had stiffened and turned his golden gaze out over the pale sands and the gathering storm. As soon as the rain had stopped, he’d strode off into the desert, a ragged dark shape against the dunes, and Aziraphale hadn’t seen him again for a hundred years.

The impulse to touch Crowley and the fear of doing so warred in him for a moment, and then he thought of the other ways humans liked to be touched. Mothers cradling children, men embracing before battle, friends clasping hands. Lovers, too, warming each other in the night.

 _If he doesn’t like it, he’ll let me know,_ he decided, and deliberately pushed more of the tangles of Crowley’s hair back over his shoulder. This time Crowley didn’t recoil, though his eyes were still fixed not on his hands but his face. 

Crowley’s hair was so thickly snarled and tangled that it would be impossible to comb. He let some of his power flow into his fingertips, and stroked them down a single length, the miracle easing out the knots, smoothing the hair so it shone in the firelight. 

He slowly rose out of the chair, and moved carefully to step behind Crowley, watching his feet so he didn’t blunder onto a length of tail. 

“I’ll just fix this up for you,” he said, in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “You wouldn’t like it, if you could see yourself.”

With that, he took up the fullness of Crowley’s hair and let it fall back between his folded wings, smoothing his hands through the lengths of it, the knots and snarls easing away with the trickle of power that ran through his fingers. It fell down almost to Crowley’s waist, longer than in Eden or Mesopotamia or under the harsh sun of Golgotha. It was soft, too, softer than Aziraphale expected. 

“There you are,” he said when it was done, pleased with himself, moving to stand beside the demon again and warm himself by the fire again. “Much better. I’d braid it for you, but I’ve never known how.”

Crowley moved his head with that familiar curious tilt, and gathered up a handful of his own hair and looked at it, as if seeing it for the first time. 

Before Aziraphale could think better of it, he reached out and pushed the hair back, tucking those few strands behind his ear.

Crowley went still, and Aziraphale pulled his hand back. Or tried to anyway, because Crowley’s hand came up and grasped his forearm. Gently, so the claws were resting on his skin.

And then Crowley tilted his head again, and pressed the palm of Aziraphale’s hand to his face. 

For the span of several heartbeats, Aziraphale couldn’t move. Crowley’s face was as familiar as the sun, and as remote, and he’d never dared imagine what it might feel like to put his hand against the line of his jaw.

He didn’t pull his hand away, as he should have done. 

Instead he spread his fingers and rested his hand against Crowley’s hair, cupping the side of his head. Stroked his thumb over Crowley’s ear and along the lines of his tattoo, across the sharpness of his cheekbone.

Crowley’s claws were cool and smooth against his forearm. Gently, so very gently, the demon drew both their hands down, trailing Aziraphale’s hand along his neck and then his shoulder. His pupils were wide and black against the marigold-yellow of his irises.

Aziraphale still didn’t take his hand away. 

Instead he traced the dip above of Crowley’s collarbone and the notch at the base of his throat. Crowley shivered, and he pulled Aziraphale’s hand lower, down along the flatness of his chest, until Aziraphale’s fingers grazed against his nipple. 

Crowley’s breath was coming faster now, the rise and fall of his ribs like the rolling of waves in a river, and still he pulled Aziraphale’s hand lower, down across his stomach, to the place where human—human enough—skin met scales. 

This was some dark magic, Aziraphale thought, dimly, but he did nothing to stop himself. Instead he stroked Crowley’s waist, where the scales began, felt the way that warm human skin became serpentine. He had wondered if it would feel strange but it didn’t, it was just Crowley. 

Crowley made a low soft noise, an exhalation more than anything, and slowly pushed Aziraphale’s hand down across the scales of his front, where his legs should have parted from his body. There was, Aziraphale saw now, a place where his large belly scales met imperfectly, a line and a slight curve inwards. Crowley took his hand and placed it there, but his eyes were fixed on Aziraphale’s face. 

“I don’t—I don’t think I should touch you like this,” Aziraphale whispered, his mouth dry, the words coming out like the rustle of dead leaves. “This wasn’t what I—this isn’t what you would want—if you were yourself...”

Crowley regarded him steadily, and then he put the barest hint of pressure on Aziraphale’s wrist. The scales parted easily beneath his fingers, and he felt soft and warm and _wet_ under Aziraphale’s touch. 

Crowley made another of those low noises, and another tremor passed through him, from his wings to the very end of his tail. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said. But the rest of his words died on his tongue as Crowley’s claw-tipped hand moved his own deeper, further into his body. Crowley’s eyes glowed, the gleam of those too-sharp teeth visible through his barely parted lips. Two fingers now, and he gave an experimental stroke, and Crowley’s whole body jolted with it.

Aziraphale felt something inside himself flare in return. He couldn’t stop. He _didn’t want_ to stop. He moved his fingers again, and then again; he found a particular knot within Crowley’s body that seemed to elicit more of a reaction, made Crowley hiss and arch towards him, pushing Aziraphale’s fingers further in with each trembling movement. He put his other hand on the flat of Crowley’s stomach, felt the muscles tense with each motion of his hand, over and over. 

Until Crowley made a different noise, a guttural, broken growl between his jagged teeth, and his wings arched out. His body clenched around Aziraphale’s fingers, tight and wet, and his claws flexed on Aziraphale’s arm.

Crowley coiled forward then and for a moment Aziraphale thought it was another attack, like that first night, but instead Crowley’s face was in his neck, those clawed hands digging into the fabric of his tunic, pulling him into an embrace. Like lovers, like the humans neither of them were. 

In return, he slid his arms around the demon, breathed in the scent of him, felt his own shameful arousal hard against Crowley’s belly where they were pressed together. If he’d ever thought of this, alone in the dark with his hand moving on himself, it hadn’t been like this. Not in this empty, dark tower, surrounded by thorns and the wind. Not with Crowley like this, cursed and strange _(and beautiful too, still so beautiful)._

He felt sick and hot and ashamed and worst of all, wanting. Hungry for more. Thirsty, as if he was a human who’d been wandering in a desert, and mistook a mirage for an oasis. He put his hands on Crowley’s shoulders, meaning to push him away. But before he could, Crowley took in another gasping breath—and he spoke. 

It came out mangled by those teeth, by the fork in his tongue; a sibilant hiss against Aziraphale’s skin. But he still knew those syllables as well as any word he’d ever heard. 

“Angel.”   
  



	5. The latest dream I ever dreamt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW. Hi! Thank you all for the lovely comments. This story is very much still alive and kicking (and thrashing), and I am so incredibly grateful for all the love in the comments. Thank you all so much.
> 
> Thank you as ever to NarumiKaiko for the beta-ing, cheerleading and friendship. You are a gem. 
> 
> CW: Hallucinations, memory loss, and brief suggestions of self-harm.

He was the wrong shape. 

He was a snake, and a human-like being, and a nameless jagged thing with teeth and claws, all at once. His edges were jagged and broken. Burning stone in his guts, boiling metal in his veins. He thrashed and gouged and screamed. Fell, but the moment of impact never came. Drowned and plummeted, again and again.

In his more lucid moments, he knew if he could just push his way to the surface, spread his wings wide enough to stop the fall, he could claw his way back into himself. Inevitably, he would sink back into it, dragged under and down by dark magic.

Time moved in stops and starts. The moon flashed past, a thousand times. Sometimes he saw things in the shadows, hellish things, and when he’d rush at them they’d disappear. He glimpsed his own hands, red and bloody, some small animal ripped apart on the flagstones in front of him.

He felt cold and thirsty, and hungry, so damn hungry, he stuffed his own fists into his mouth but his claws ripped at his tongue, and he sank beneath the coppery taste.

Other things flitted past too, snow and sunrises and the scrape of thorns against his skin. Shadows leapt in flickers across a room. He coiled in darkness and watched them move in too-fast jerks. (A millennia later he would see moving pictures for the first time—an image of a horse galloping—and memories he thought worn smooth with time were shards of glass in his mind, and he went out and drank until they were gone.)

Voices echoed, sometimes, and he howled at them until they were gone, until the flickering lights retreated back amongst the trees. Darkness, light, darkness again. Stars spun in vast ancient circles around a point of distant emptiness. He’d held them once and he reached his hands out to them again, and they glittered towards him but fell through his claw-tipped fingers, and were gone.

He screamed.

* * *

_Someone had called him. Summoned him. He remembered that much, in those moments in between the drowning and the falling. Called into a circle painted in blood on the flagstones (human blood, he knew that, just from the smell) around the edge of the room. He felt the power and answered it with a flare of hellfire. He’d thought it seemed dramatic, to emerge from the flames, wings outstretched, half-snake._ Stupid, stupid.

_The human, in his ostentatious indigo and gold robes, a leather-bound book in his hands, had stepped back. But he hadn’t flinched, hadn’t run away screaming. Instead he’d delivered a list of demands: gold, and power, and immortality, and secrets, the shape of the universe. The usual._

_Almost the usual. One little request beyond those: a lover, two years in the ground._

_He hadn’t listened, he’d just grinned that too-sharp grin. These things went a certain way every time. He was a cat; the human, no matter his power, was a mouse._

_The human had been angry, he’d paced and ranted, laid out his demands with fever-bright eyes._

_“Is that all?” He’d mocked the human, hissing over his teeth. “Untold wealth and power and knowledge, and I’ll bring your dead boyfriend back from the grave? I’m a demon, not God herself.”_ Lovers always die. That’s what the stories don’t tell you. 

_The human tried other things then, begged and wept and pulled at his hair. Cajoled. Pled. Promised. As if any of that would work on a demon._

_Then came threats. He threw his head back and howled with laughter when the human vowed to punish him with this and that nonsensical spell, and then he’d drawn himself up made to beat his wings and lift away but the human had done something, something he shouldn’t have been able to do. He’d been tossed back against the flagstones as if batted by an invisible hand. He threw himself against the circle again and again, tried to transform, again and again._

_Futile._

_The human was powerful. Most powerful one he’d ever come across._

_Nothing worked, he’d been caught like an insect in amber._

_But he wouldn’t give the human what he wanted; he was old and patient. He had forever. The human had a decade or two, maybe less._

_The human left with a snarl and a curse._

_He waited. Roamed the rooms of the tower. He was limited by its stones, he discovered. Could go up and down, but not beyond._

_It didn’t matter. He’d waited out worse things. (A war that had lasted as long as it took the galaxy to rotate. A million year fall. A thousand years in hell’s stinking bowels before the order to head upstairs. Seasons upon seasons in the desert. Flood waters that left the land littered in corpses. Births and deaths, in numbers too great to count. The world wheeled on.)_

_He took a nap in the human’s bed._

_He returned, made his human demands. He laughed._

_The human left again, and he waited again. Slept some more._

_The human came back. He hissed and flicked his tail when the human woke him. His hair was turning the colour of ashes. His face was lined. He was getting old._ He _could sleep through a century; the human’s time was running out._

_But this time the human came back with another set of magic words, words he’d never heard before, words that seared into his skin._

_“If you won’t give me what I want, you can rot in this tower forever,” the human spat. “You’ll never again know peace, you’ll never again know joy or love.”_

_“I’m a demon,” he’d hissed back. “We’ve never known those things.”_ (A lie, a terrible lie, he’d known them, he knew them still. There was a word for all of them.)

_The human lifted his hand, and power flowed through his fingers._

_After that he fell. He drowned. He screamed._

_After that._

_After._

* * *

He was there and not-there, slipping in and out of the seasons, in and out of day and night, hours like centuries and years like single gasping breaths. 

And then he caught a scent in the wind and he knew something was close. Something familiar and bright. It shouldn’t be there, it was too bright, it was the midday sun over a desert sky. He screamed a warning from the battlements. Don’t come here. _(I don’t want you to find me like this.)_

It kept coming. _He kept coming._

He waited in the shadows of the tower as it drew near. Felt the shimmering. It smelled like things he’d known the names of, but when he opened his mouth the words were dashed away by his own howls. 

_Don’t come here. Don’t come._

It came out of the woods and crossed the lake, crossed through the thorns, and he heard it at the door. He pushed himself back into the corner in the darkness and waited. 

Light bloomed below, pale and clear. His claws dug into the stone as it grew brighter, moved up the narrow stairs, sending shadows fleeing. _Don’t come, don’t come._

A human figure emerged with the light, stepped into the tower room. 

Not human, no; no more human than an exploding star. No more human than _he_ was. But not like him. A human shape that barely held something vast and pure and good. 

There was a word for it, a clanging bell that rang once in his mind and then disappeared, echoes rolling into darkness. He could feel himself fraying again, feel the very idea of himself falling away again, the waters rising. 

_Don’t. Go. Please._

The human-shaped being glanced around the room, and then looked up. 

“Crowley,” the being said, “come down from there this instant.” 

He fell. 

* * *

  
  


The word. The word for the being that held out the apple slices—he knew that _word,_ apple—no not that word. _The_ word. 

It was there and not-there. A hot spark in his chest. Sweet and sharp on his tongue. Molten gold. 

The word. The word for a human-shaped being with wings, glowing white wings outstretched across the tower room. The word did not flinch or move away when he put his claws in the feathers. 

The word followed him up the stairs, stood under the star-littered sky on the tower’s battlement. Spoke to him in a soft low voice. Told him of things. Food and people and a snake on a dusty road. Called him a name he barely recognised.

He wanted to say he understood at least some of it, but if he opened his mouth all that came out was a hiss or a wail. 

The word reached out and touched him. Put warm fingers in his hair. Still speaking in that voice, soft and alive and gentle. The word was a hand reaching down through the rough seas to take his, to pull him out of the waves. 

He touched his face, and _he_ remembered. 

* * *

He remembered: the smell of orange blossoms. The taste of wine.

The crashing of steel against steel, the weight of metal on his shoulders, damp mist clinging to his skin. 

The sea-salt of oysters. 

Harsh desert sunlight, as the soldiers hammered wicked iron spikes into a silent man’s wrists, while women sobbed and the smell of blood washed across the land. 

The endless rain. The bloated bodies on the rocks. 

Cooking fires and tents in the desert. Children laughing. So many children.

A white wing overhead, the first raindrops, the garden.

And the _word,_ the sound of it echoing through the ages. The word had been there, from the beginning. 

* * *

Wanting. He remembered that, too. The endless wanting, aching inside his bones. Wanting that clear pale gaze turned his way, wanting that smile, that laugh. Wanting more.

_I want you._

He caught at the hand on his jaw, enough of him in his own mind to be careful of his claws. 

The word stared at him, open-mouthed, breaths coming shallow and fast. 

He pushed the hand against his skin, down his neck, across his chest, lower, to his belly, lower still. 

Nothing was left of him now but the wanting and the word, and the sensation of the hand; trailing liquid gold beneath his skin, pooling between his scales. Nothing but the point where the hand was moved, stroked; his claws around the wrist. 

The word. _The word._

The hand moved, and the gold spiralled up and out and everywhere, he was within it, he was caught in an updraft, he was lifted from the darkness onto dry land, he was lit up by it, the word tolled out, the word was—he was—his—

“Angel,” he said, reaching out to wrap his arms around Aziraphale and breathe in his familiar scent.

Then he fell, and darkness crashed over him again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Aziraphale, on his way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26647420) by [everybody_lives](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everybody_lives/pseuds/everybody_lives)




End file.
